Frontiers - Nature

In taking American Sign Language to fulfill her foreign language requirement, Rachel Romeo, C'11, often interacted with the Philadelphia Deaf community. She came across several people who said they'd suffered ear infections or diseases like meningitis in early childhood, and as a result, had developed hearing impairments that had gone undetected.

SAS faculty share their insights on the human brain.

Priya Ratneshwar

Everything from education to warfare comes down to the workings of the human mind, and now the mind itself is being understood in terms of the brain. Across numerous disciplines, Penn Arts and Sciences faculty are studying this amazing three-pound organ and the insights it is offering on diverse human problems.

Grad student identifies a new species of dinosaur.

Mark Wolverton

"According to my parents, I've been interested in dinosaurs since I was a very young child," notes graduate student Andrew McDonald, "farther back than I can remember." By high school, he had decided to make a career out of studying them.

Mathematicians Phillip Gressman and Robert Strain solve a 140-year old equation describing the motion of gas molecules.

Priya Ratneshwar

During the late 1860s and 1870s, when steam-powered technology was at its height, scientists were eager to understand the mechanisms underlying their empirical observations of how the temperature, volume and pressure of gaseous material interacted. In 1872, physicists Ludwig Boltzmann and James Clerk Maxwell developed a foundational equation predicting the motion of gas molecules.

For the past two years Michael Sulewski, C'11, has worked with a team of scientists in the lab of biologist Ted Abel on cutting-edge research that explores how to increase gene activity central to long-term memory formation.

Douglas Jerolmack and Federico Falcini of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science discuss the catastrophic oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

Peter Nichols

Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Science Douglas
Jerolmack and postdoctoral researcher Federico Falcini have been studying
the flow of river water and sediment into large bodies of the Earth's waters.

We know that physical conditioning, weapons training and fighting skill prepare soldiers for the rigors of combat, but a recent study by cognitive neuroscientist Amishi Jha shows that meditation practice gives them "mental armor" to better withstand the trauma of war.